Technology Events

The brutal trail to bringing a car computer to market is littered with casualties of failed products. We certainly have gotten run over a few times. Vizualogic's booth at SEMA was significantly scaled down. At CES this year, they have no booth and no published display suites. Audiovox is suing them for patent infringement. Anyone who is bringing a computing product to market better fasten their seat belt. It is a rough ride.

This product might actually have been around for a few years but we havenít seen people talk about it on our forums. We werenít able to make it up to their booth before the show closed, but there units are all hand made in Italy. If Audison reads this, we would love to borrow one for a few weeks to test it and compare it to the Focal Amp. We found a website showing a price of 3,000 Euro. As a non-audiophile, the big advantage I can see here over the focal unit is that this unit has 4 channels. If we can get both units in for testing it would be fun to do a side by side comparison.

Airbiquity is the data link technology behind Ford Sync. What is exciting you ask? You can use any cell phone from any carrier to get 800bps of data to your telematics solution. Even if you have a nasty phone carrier like ATT or Verizon that doesnít permit tethering, Airbiquity's technology will use your Bluetooth hands free profile to pull down the data you need or make an emergency call. In my opinion 800bps will cover the majority of remote data needs until you reach a broadband link. Lots of innovative stuff can be done with technology at very low costs due to the ability to leverage consumers existing devices.

As long time members on our forums, this team really shares in the passion for car computing. They have made an amazing prototype of their product which is on display at CES this year. Final units are expected in April. The unit without a rear seat entertainment (RSE) system will retail at $2,750. Add on an RSE package and it will cost $485 more. This may seem pricey, but they have made some custom cables and hardware devices which should help simply and speed up the installation process. Dashboard devices has 2 units being road tested in Amsterdam now. They have made some great progress with this product but as some of us know, one of the hardest things to do is move this from the 1-2 trial stage to being able to make, sell, market and support car computers at a larger scale production level. This is where most companies struggle. There are many companies who have failed completely and others who have announced product and several years later never released anything. We will talk more about the difficulties of bringing a car computing product to market in a later post.